Monday, October 27, 2008

Fall is here

And it hit fast.

We went from days in the 60s to a freeze warning last night - 31 degrees. All the houseplants are inside now, taking up a good chunk of the living room, and now I have to find a way to keep El Burrito from digging in the dirt again. I'll have to rig something up to keep the Christmas cactus cool and dark; they're starting to bloom right now, but they don't like a lot of heat.

Luckily, the new furnace will be installed tomorrow (along with a new water heater and AC). Just in time, since we weren't comfortable with leaving the old one on overnight, even with the talking CO2 detector. (Seriously - instead of beeping, the thing talks to you.) We've been turning the heat on for 20 minutes or so at a time, but leaving it off most of the time. We're an upper unit, though, so we get a lot of bleedover heat from the downstairs and next-door neighbors.

Turns out we probably won't get a lot of efficiency improvement in the furnace. The new one will basically be a 23-year-newer version of the old one, because it has to fit into this tiny utility closet, and there aren't many models that will fit into the available (tiny) footprint. If we had two more inches of space, we could get a big improvement, but it's just not workable. On the other hand, there will be about a 30% improvement in the AC unit. Not sure about the water heater, but I'm guessing that our 30-gallon model is probably down to 15 gallons by now - hard water, and as far as I know, it's never had any of the periodic draining that you're supposed to do.

(Oh, and gas has dropped again. $2.35 now. I doubt it lasts, though. Won't surprise me if it shoots right back up in about a week.)

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